The West End Piloting Smart Parking, Smart Irrigation, and Public Wi-Fi

The Dallas Innovation Alliance has launched its second phase of its Smart Cities Living Lab, piloting projects including smart irrigation systems, smart parking, and Public Wi-Fi in the West End, and a mobility initiative in South Dallas.

The second phase will include six projects, the alliance announced on Tuesday. For the projects, it is once again leveraging the partnerships it has with the city and local corporations to support the efforts.

“With the launch of this second phase of projects in the West End, Living Lab data will grow more robust and provide even better insights as we look to scale more broadly across the city,” Jennifer Sanders, DIA executive director, said in a release.

Smart water management: The offering will include metering to provide more granular interval data for customer conservation, as well as leak and tamper detection via water analytics dashboards from Washington-based Itron.

Smart parking: This effort will be led by Dallas startup ParkHub, which will offer information about traffic flow and parking spot availability via any mobile device.

AT&T Smart Cities Digital Infrastructure: The project will be powered by City IQ by Current and will deliver initial applications that will include “TrafficPulse,” “ParkingView” and “CitySight.”

Public Wi-Fi: The offering available in the Living Lab is a joint effort between the city of Dallas and AT&T, Cisco, Nokia and Scientel.

Mobility initiative: The effort is in the research phase and is being developed in South Dallas in conjunction with Toyota Motor North America. Toyota’s Ryan Klem, who leads mobility programs for the company’s Social Innovation team, says the project will “improve the quality of life for those in need in South Dallas.” No further details have been released.

The projects follow the alliance’s first phase, which included smart street lighting provided by GE and Philips, solar-powered environmental sensors from Ericsson, the Interactive Digital WayPoint kiosk from CIVIQ Smartscapes, and pedestrian beacons from EB Systems. Those projects, which launched in March, have already yielded results, the DIA states.

So far, they have aided in the increase of revenue for West End businesses, which are using data on foot traffic to improve marketing and operational investments. Customer traffic data has shown almost a 7 percent increase. The increase in business activity and improved lighting have aided in a 6 percent decrease in crime from 2016 to 2017, the alliance said. Crime in December 2017 was down 27 percent from the same time the year prior. The alliance, a public-private partnership founded in 2015, is currently working with the city and Oncor to refine its calculations to show the impact the smart lighting could have on cost for the city. It expects to show that the replacements could save tens of millions of dollars over 10 years.

“The work of AT&T and the Dallas Innovation Alliance in building a Living Lab has provided a great platform to test and share results of projects that could broadly impact Dallas for the benefit of our citizens,” Mayor Mike Rawlings said in a release. “We look forward to continued progress in creating a truly smart city for all of Dallas.”